PMA Assistant Professor Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz has published an academic article called “Love and Theft in Dance Economies” in the Journal Performance Philosophy, in Volume 8, Number 2: Responsive Bodies: The Ethics of Temporal Community in Contemporary Dance.
Juan Manuel spoke with us about the inspiration for this piece:
“This article was inspired by conversations with my students at Cornell. As someone who teaches dance history and studio courses, I have encountered a growing apprehension by many students who express anxiety about appropriating dances that do not belong to them. For example, in 2021, I was invited to facilitate a conversation for a dance group on our campus on how to properly attribute dances after the public dispute involving Charli D’Amelio, who failed to cite Jalaiah Harmon as the original choreographer of the viral Renegade dance. The student dancers had many questions about how to honor dances whose histories they did not know or could not be known, but that they loved to do. Most of these students came to college without a dance background, and they gravitated towards dance groups for social bonding and a break from the demands of their coursework. However, they often stop dancing after they graduate and pursue careers in fields like information sciences, engineering, or labor relations. They asked, “How do we navigate our love for dance in the face of appropriation without taking the fun out of the experience?” I have encountered this growing concern in many of the classes I teach. This article is for those students, as well as other readers, and it offers a systemic and symbolic assessment of the barriers that exclude and exploit historically and presently oppressed choreographers of color and their communities. More than reprimand and limit dance practices, the article offers new language for these discussions and moves beyond the limited appreciation/appropriation binary. I look forward to discussing this article with students in my future classes.”
Read the article from Performance Philosophy.
